Pioneer Files: A Homeschooling Veteran Speaks

 

A man who lives without honor will not gain from education.

The summer of 1981 presented me a fourth child in ten years of marriage along with a mystery illness. I was thrilled to be a new mom again but felt something wrong in my body. After two rugged post-partum hospital stays, the doctors sent me home with more questions than answers and a batch of random medications for the infection, pain, electrolyte imbalance, and bizarre neurological symptoms. 

My mother and dear husband cared for all five of us as I fought to get back on my feet.

As I began to recover, Mom casually mentioned one day that she had read about the work of educational professionals Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore. They advocated the delay of formal education for children until the age of eight. Though homeschooling was not part of their early theory, they eventually became known as the "grandparents" of home education. 

I read their book Better Late than Early and immediately knew God was speaking. Frankly, it ticked me off. Hadn't I given enough already? Being a wife and mom was all I ever wanted in life, and I loved that calling with everything in me. 

But my body was sick and tired, and I wasn't even thirty years old. I assaulted heaven with a torrent of reasons why educating my children at home was a bad idea.

Heaven was unimpressed, unmoved by my impassioned excuses. God was calling.

I knew.

Not one person thought I was doing the right thing when I began to prepare for the fall of 1982 school year. My mother, worried about my health, was horrified and blamed herself for starting it. My husband thought it a bad idea, too, but promised his support. 

I broke down and cried the first time I tried to read the curriculum we had purchased. I didn't know the first thing about educating my children or comprehend "phonics," having learned to read with Dick and Jane. The first year, I only kept going out of stubbornness. I got through each day by promising to quit "tomorrow."

Then I burned through the resentment, surrendered to God, and began to press into the task before me. We all just learned together, including how to work together, how treat each other, how to problem-solve, and how to love our God. Watching my children's eagerness, their little heads bent over their lessons each day, captured my heart forever. The day my son read his first words while seated on my lap, I was hooked. How could I have ever imagined relinquishing this blessing to a stranger? 

My husband and I educated all five children at home, beginning in 1982 and graduating the last child in 2006. We worked hard, enjoyed each other's company, and made many wonderful memories. I cherish those days, living on the edge of faith as we pioneered in a fledging movement. Homeschooling has come a long ways from the days we had to fight to make it a legal educational alternative. 

Did we do it perfectly? Of course not. Did we all ride into the sunset on our white horses? Nope. We gained five wonderful children who have given their lives to Jesus. All our grandchildren either graduated from homeschool or are currently being home educated. Growing up together in God, at home, prepared us for the hard roads we have walked in the years since. I believe we would never have emerged victorious through the challenges we have faced, had we not had those beautiful, innocent years together. 

In the weeks ahead, I will share from my files and my heart what I learned in my nearly quarter century of home education. There will be beauty and ugly. My prayer is that something we experienced along the way will encourage you as you seek out God in your own family's life. 

Blessings,

Pam Thorson 

When Fear Is at the Door

 

Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there. – Unknown

Fear knocked at my door a lot this last decade. 

Events over which I had no control hounded me relentlessly, leaving me to feel as if I were bobbing helplessly along in a swift river toward a massive waterfall – something like Bogey and Kate in African Queen. 

Except I had the drama without the glamour. Each day I grimly pushed through the day’s challenges as I have tried to ignore the persistent pounding on my spirit’s door.

    

Some days I totally gave in to it. One week in 2012, I discovered I had a nasty infection, followed by bad reactions to each of the two different antibiotics prescribed by my doctor. One was particularly frightening. I debated whether to go to ER but settled instead on going to bed to wait out the night. My family prayed for me, released me from my share of the caregiving duties, and watched protectively as I snuggled under the comfort of my new throw (a Pier One Valentine’s gift from my dear husband) and tried to shut my eyes against the raging storm in my body.

The greater storm was the one in my spirit.

The physical pounding in my heart echoed the fear emanating from behind the door of the unknown as it rattled the doorknob and threatened to pull me into its depths.

Just then, my husband came up bearing a small container of pure, extra-virgin olive oil from the kitchen. He slipped to my side and offered to anoint me as he prayed for me. I gladly accepted. He poured a bit out and touched it to my forehead as he prayed a simple but heartfelt prayer for healing. It was nothing grandiose or commanding – just a request to his God on behalf of his beloved.

The physical storm did not immediately stop, but the spiritual one subsided as that incomprehensible peace only the Spirit can give washed over me. My husband’s intercession was the reminder I needed that God is always in control. It was his faith going to the door for me and opening it to find nothing on the other side.

The next day I felt much better and went on to recovery without incident.

That storm has been followed in the years since by others more fearsome. Each time, I am reminded our struggle is truly not a physical one, but one against the “flaming missiles of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16). In this age of lawlessness and disrespect for human life, we do not battle with the culture of death alone, but with the “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). 

For those wars in our lives, we must put on the whole armor of God and walk in complete fearlessness, never forgetting we serve a big God who is alive, well, and fully in charge.

God is real. Fear is the shadow.

Today may God strengthen and encourage you for whatever doors you face. As you surround yourself with His armor, my prayer is He will grant us all the courage to open those doors and dispel our fears. Who knows what opportunities for God’s service and glory lie behind them?

Not to fear is the armor. 

- Ulrich Zwingli

For God has not given us a spirit of fear,
but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
- 2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV

Photo courtesy Erik Thorson 2023

The God of Small Beginnings

 

For who has despised the day of small things? – Zechariah 4:10

Humans love to do things in a big way.

We're always searching for the breakout audience, the bright lights, and those fifteen minutes of fame. If we had the power of God, we'd create a universal circus of obnoxious grandstanding as we fought for fame.

God, the All-Powerful One, never flaunts His authority for personal gain, breathing life instead into the small flame of faith. Unlike His creation, He delights in the humble and the vulnerable. Through the cacophony of much-speaking, He alone hears the cry of the dawn-whisperer. 

The cosmos sprung to life at His Word. He populated a planet with two people fashioned from dirt and rebuilt Earth with a shipbuilder. He drew a man from the dirty water of the Nile and made him a deliverer. He created soldiers from slaves and conquered whole kingdoms with simple acts of obedience.

He flattened tower walls with a shout of praise and sent fire from heaven at the sound of a prayer.

He called a shepherd boy from the hills and set him over an entire nation. He immortalized David’s simple songs of anguish and praise to bring comfort to millions of hurting people for generations after him. He set a man upon the throne because he only asked for wisdom. He sent a Jewish captive to save her people from the plot of a powerful and deadly enemy.

At the appointed time for the King to set foot in His kingdom, it was not the grand halls of earth that received His Majesty, but a cave. He didn’t arrive to the roar of adoring crowds, but to the wondering whispers of shepherds. He didn’t make His entrance in a blaze of earthly glory, but in the light of a shimmering star and the song of angels.

The first Voice the earth heard from its King was not the triumphant shout of victory, but the wail of a baby. The first to behold His face were His parents and miscellaneous stable animals. He arrived surrounded by little warmth, light, or comfort. 

He brought all three with Him to offer a desperate world.

Out of prison cells across the centuries and from the cracked lips of suffering, God's glory emerges.

Beaten, persecuted, despised, and weak, God’s people are the lowly canvas upon which He paints His masterpiece of love. The light and dark colors of each life committed to Him produce a work of breathtaking beauty and scope.

God rejoices in small beginnings because it gives Him a chance to work; a chance to be our strength; the space to reveal Himself as our Deliverer. It offers Him the opportunity to fill the vacuum left by our nothingness. Since He can’t fill us with His glory when we’re already full of ourselves, smallness keeps us empty and available.

Thank God for small beginnings. May we always be small in our own eyes.

Awakening

How accurate is today's medical criteria for deciding who lives and who dies? 

A man’s pregnant wife fell into a coma after losing a baby to a blood infection. She was unresponsive and on a ventilator for two weeks. When the hospital told the man they were going to pull the plug, he “snaps and tells his wife off,” according to news reports. Two hours later, she began breathing on her own. Eventually, she regained consciousness.

This story and others like it have made me think. I wish I could ask some questions of the couple and the hospital:

• Could the woman hear her husband “telling her off” while she was in a coma?
• Did the doctor have any explanation for her awakening?
• Has anyone explored the possibility that brain activity becomes so quiet during trauma that it becomes unmeasurable by medical standards, giving the false impression the person is, in effect, dead?
• Has the fact that some people have awakened after being declared dead made the hospital rethink its protocol for turning off the vent?
• As healthcare costs continue to skyrocket and improved medical technology prolongs lives that would have been lost in earlier times, has the medical field lost its collective patience and begun to replace compassion with convenience?
• Has the financial and emotional enticement to harvest organs for transplantation trampled the physician's promise to "do no harm" to the patient?1.

Err on the side of life

As a mother who has twice had to fight for the life of a beloved family member against the decision of a medical provider, I urge others to err on the side of life until we have the answers we need for these and other vital questions. 

Everyone deserves the chance for an awakening.

1.https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html

Photo courtesy Erik Thorson 2023

The Gift of Existence

It would have been easier to die.

Kevin Thorson lay paralyzed in the grass of a church lawn in Canada, unable to move or breathe. Moments earlier, he missed a rotation while practicing backflips with a friend. He fell on his head and broke his neck nearly at his skull. As the friend ran for help, he lay there alone, fading into blackness as he fell unconscious.

He told us later that it was at the moment he felt himself near death that the presence of God came to him. The sense of the next world was intensely powerful, forever making this side of the veil seem the impostor. It would have been quick, even merciful, to have slipped quietly away to join God.

God wasn't there to take Kevin to heaven, though.

Instead, He had a message for Kevin. A voice so real Kevin thought it was audible told him, “You’re going to be okay.”

He awakened not okay. He was in a desperate fight for his life. Emergency personnel worked feverishly to keep him alive until he could be put on life support. He endured a helicopter ride to a larger hospital in Calgary, a doctor’s push for euthanasia, surgeries, pneumonia, bronchoscopy, paralysis, loss of privacy, and much pain in the first weeks before he returned home.

Later he endured serious infections landing him in intensive care. He had more surgeries for kidney stones. He spent two years on the ventilator before weaning off it during his waking hours, a feat declared an impossibility by his doctors. 

He regained more than they expected, but not enough for a normal life.

The loss was profound. It came in layers as the reality of the depth of his disability struck home. Some days he grieved over the dreams he would never see realized. Other days he longed for just the feel of grass beneath his feet again.

As victories came, like breathing on his own and taking his first steps and running a computer, his soul began to revive. He began to truly appreciate being alive. Watching him struggle to live out his faith despite profound brokenness, I began to see how completely God had brought to pass what He promised Kevin: 

He would be okay.

Existence, in all its facets, is a gift.

It is the man who has been told he would never breathe on his own who appreciates the feeling of air in his lungs.

It is the man who has endured great pain who appreciates a day when his body is at peace.

It is the man who once lost all feeling who takes joy in the warmth of the sun on his arms, the softness of a kitten’s fur beneath his fingers, and his legs under him again as he takes his first shaky steps.

It is the man who has had everything taken away who treasures anything given back.

Only when faced with loss do we truly understand the value of life.

To exist is to be. We are made in mirror image of our Creator, who calls Himself the great “I AM.” We were made to experience. We were made to feel, to love, to laugh, to hurt.

Those who say, “I would never want to live like that” must give room to those who do want to live, even if it is “like that.” The disabled and the vulnerable and the aged and the pre-born have no duty to die because their existence is inconvenient for others.

Yes, it would have been easier for Kevin to die that awful day in 1997. But what richness of life we would have missed in knowing him! The world is a better place because he exists.

Easier is not the same as better.

If you have ever contemplated how much easier it would be to be dead, talk to Kevin. He will tell you the gift is worth the fight. Check out the website Kevin founded and manages today. He is the owner/administrator of CMADDICT.com, a premier source of free Christian music and more. He would be glad to talk to you.

Photo Courtesy Grace Thorson 2023